Writing is not a “soft skill.” It is the functional infrastructure modern organizations run on. When writing is weak, decision-making slows, execution falters, and trust erodes. When writing is strong, the opposite happens, often compounding into a virtuous cycle of greater productivity, cost savings, and elevated performance. Ultimately, investing in writing skills training strengthens how organizations think, decide, and act. That’s because:
- Most critical work happens through written communication
- Writing skills do not improve automatically or self-correct at the team level
- Poor writing creates hidden but significant productivity and financial costs
- Team-based writing skills training is the only scalable way to improve clarity, alignment, and outcomes across an organization.
Writing Quality Is Company Quality Made Visible
In most modern organizations, the most important work rarely happens in a meeting. It happens in the follow-up email that clarifies next steps, in the project brief that translates strategy into action, and in the internal memo that frames a decision before it is ever formally approved. It happens in specifications, reports, proposals, policies, and documentation.
In other words, it happens in writing.
Yet many organizations continue to treat writing skills as either a relatively unimportant secondary skill, something that matters (maybe) for polish or professionalism, but not for performance. Even organizations that recognize and appreciate writing’s true importance will usually just assume their workers already have all the writing skills they need, learned long ago in school.
The result is a quiet but huge disconnect between how work gets done and how organizations invest in developing the skills that support it.
Are Writing Skills Really That Essential?
Yes! Poor writing produces problems that will impede business performance; strong writing will boost business prospects. Even more significantly, whether writing works well or poorly at an organization will often turn into either a virtuous or vicious cycle, accelerating either the negative outcomes or the benefits gained over time.
It’s estimated that American businesses spend 6% of total wages on time wasted attempting to get meaning out of poorly written material. One study found that 81% of professionals say poorly written material is a “major impediment to productivity.” In extreme cases, bad writing can even lead to outright disaster.
At the same time, strong, effective team writing can yield commensurately massive business benefits. In his book Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please, law professor Joseph Kimble cites examples like FedEx and the U.S. Navy. The latter, for instance, saved $27 to $37 millionper year after rewriting business memos so they could be read in less time.
For its part, FedEx’s ground operations manual once proved so difficult to read and understand that readers would only find the information they needed about half (53%) of the time. However, after they improved the readability of these manuals, the time taken to find information fell by 28%, and the success rate in finding information increased by 27%.
Altogether, this one improvement in writing at their organization saved FedEx $400,000 in just the first year, with compounding cost savings thereafter, all thanks to improving the quality of their written documents.
Why Writing Skills Do Not Improve Automatically
One of the most persistent myths in professional environments is that writing skills naturally improve with experience, but professional writing is a specialized skill, not a natural byproduct of education. Most employees were trained to write for academic settings, not for organizational decision-making.
And no, modern technology does not compensate for human writing weaknesses nor make human writing obsolete or less important. If anything, the power of the written word has only increased for modern organizations.
“Communication is critical for every function inside of an organization, and that’s what’s different than the past,” says Robert Siegel, author of The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical.
Left unaddressed, these skills and communications gaps will only widen over time. High performers and managers learn to compensate, but only via means that sap productivity and time, by spending more time writing, reading, and revising than they should. We’ve written about this before. The organization absorbs the cost, even if no one can quite name or quantify it.
Worse, sometimes writing that should or needs to happen just…doesn’t. One respondent to a survey of work writing challenges said, “Many [of my colleagues] are so bad at writing that they avoid it completely.”
Why Writing Skills Training Matters
Organizations that rely on writing but fail to train it are building on an unstable foundation. We can think of writing’s role in the workplace like this:
- Modern organizations run on written communication.
- Poor writing degrades decision-making, execution, and trust.
- Individual writing skill varies widely and do not self-correct at the team level.
- Training is the only scalable way to align and elevate writing across teams.
Training writing skills is therefore not about polishing or better grammar. It is about strengthening how the organization thinks, decides, acts, and interacts with customers and other stakeholders.
The good news is that writing skills training for teams will help organizations to develop the kinds of writing-related processes and know-how that significantly improve writing output. Well-designed writing skills training helps teams learn how to:
- Frame problems clearly before proposing solutions
- Organize information so readers can act on it quickly
- Write with specific readers and decisions in mind
- Reduce ambiguity without oversimplifying complexity
Why Writing Skills Training for “Teams”?
We’ve been emphasizing teams in this article, and there’s a reason why: writing in organizations is rarely a solo act.
This is part of what we mean when we say professional writing is specialized when compared to academic or informal writing. Even when a professional document has only a single author, it will almost always go through a formal review, revision, and approval process that involves others. And even in those rare cases where it doesn’t, the document is still going to reflect the larger team’s shared assumptions, processes, objectives, and expectations.
This is why writing skills training is most effective when delivered at the team level. Teams need a common language for clarity, shared standards for structure, and aligned expectations about what “good” looks like. Without this alignment, even individually strong writers struggle to be effective.
Team-based training turns writing into a collective capability. It reduces friction between functions, improves collaboration, and makes work more legible across the organization. Over time, it creates a culture where clarity is expected rather than admired.
FAQs
Isn’t writing ability something employees should already have?
Most professionals know how to write at a basic level, but workplace writing is a specialized skill that is rarely taught explicitly. Academic writing, creative writing, and professional writing serve very different purposes.
In organizations, writing is used to make decisions, coordinate work, manage risk, and document accountability. Without targeted training, teams develop inconsistent habits that increase confusion and rework, even when individual contributors are highly capable.
How is writing skills training different from general communication training?
Writing skills training focuses on how written communication functions inside an organization. That includes structuring information for busy readers, clarifying purpose, reducing ambiguity, and aligning content to specific decisions or actions.
It also incorporates strategy and process considerations to maximize the impact of writing output. General communication training often focuses largely on just grammar, superficial readability, and individual knowledge. Writing skills training for teams addresses the written materials that actually carry most of an organization’s day-to-day work and teaches participants how to align their written documents with business goals.
Why is team-based writing training more effective than training individuals?
Writing in organizations is inherently collaborative, and problems in writing will inevitably spiral outwards (to understand better how, read our detailed analysis of “The Ripple Effects of Poor Writing on Collaboration”). Documents are shared, reviewed, reused, and relied upon by others. Training individuals in isolation does not create shared standards or expectations. Team-based writing training aligns how groups think about clarity, structure, and purpose, which reduces friction and improves consistency across functions.
What kinds of business outcomes can writing skills training influence?
Better documentation improves business results. Organizations that invest in writing skills training often see improvements in decision quality, execution speed, onboarding efficiency, and risk management. Clearer writing reduces misunderstandings, shortens feedback cycles, and makes work easier to scale. Over time, this translates into fewer errors, less rework, and stronger organizational performance.
Writing Skills Training as a Strategic Investment
For modern organizations, writing skills training is about strengthening the systems that support thinking, decision-making, and execution. Organizations that invest in writing skills see returns in the form of faster onboarding, fewer errors, clearer accountability, and better alignment between strategy and action. They are better equipped to scale without losing coherence. Perhaps most importantly, they reduce the hidden tax that poor writing imposes on everyone’s time and attention.
If you’re ready to benefit from best-in-class writing skills training for teams, visit our portfolio of team writing workshops or contact our teamfor a no-obligation consultation on your team’s specific situation and needs.
